Guillermo del Toro Talks Call of Duty

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Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy director loves his intense CoD sessions.

By John Gaudiosi

Guillermo del Toro is revered by gamers and genre film fans, having successfully brought cult comic book antihero Hellboy to the big screen and video game consoles. The Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth director is busy filming Legendary Entertainment's monster movie Pacific Rim, but he took time to produce the new horror film, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark – a project that's very close to his heart.

When he's not making movies, Del Toro is a dedicated gamer, so he had plenty to say about the rivalry between Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Electronic Arts' Battlefield 3 in this exclusive interview.

What are your thoughts about the rivalries that occur within the video game industry? The big one this year will be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 versus Battlefield 3? I think that it happens also in movies. With any genre we walk that very narrow line, for good or for bad. You are either a step behind someone, or a step ahead of someone. That happens also in movies. You see often rival vampire movies, rival meteor movies, rival Snow White movies. I think it's no different in the video game world now that it's a very crowded, very profitable industry.

Call of Duty is the biggest video game franchise of all time. What are your thoughts about how that franchise has grown over the years and become very cinematic? I absolutely am a big Call of Duty fan. Every time a new Call of Duty comes out – I never play the games online, but I play the solo version super fast. My family knows not to interrupt me the day they come out, they know it's a sacred date for me. I think my favorite visually, of all of the Call of Duty games -- even if it's not as sassy and high tech -- is World at War because. That game has some really incredible episodes in Berlin and the Japanese fields. It's really quite arresting for me, visually, and it was very immersive. But I love Modern Warfare, too.

Why do you think that Modern Warfare, in particular, has become such a cultural phenomenon? I think the fact that the missions have such variety. The fact that independent of the story itself -- you can argue that they are not narratively very strong -- Modern Warfare has the betrayals and the reversals. It has that incredibly powerful couple of episodes where you are in a warfare situation in America, or the very tricky sequence with the hostages in the airport. Ultimately, even if you discount the narrative value, the variety of the missions and the way they feel like an escalation -- they have really great rhythm. You can go through a really intense mission in the fields and then you have a really interesting sniper mission. It's very immersive. The peaks and valleys of the missions are really instinctively very well planned.

What game have you been playing lately that's impressed you? I'm right now playing Portal 2. It's a great puzzle game, and it's really good because it travels with me. I've been traveling so much between location in Los Angeles and Canada that we the Xbox either in the house in LA or the house in Toronto. I'm incredibly happy with Portal 2 because it's really fun puzzle solving.

What separates Don't Be Afraid of the Dark from other horror films? The film is a return to a classical film of horror. I really enjoyed it because we shot it thinking it would be a PG-13 and we were given an R for pervasive horror, so I'm very proud of the R. But it's not a movie that has gore, or sex, or horror. It's really a return to form, to a more classical tale, and even then it got an R, so I imagine it's effectively scary. It's really like a badge of honor. To get an R for pervasive scariness, there's no adult language, there's no adult situations, it's all as a twisted fairytale. People who go see this movie are going to view some deeply disturbing footage.

What's the secret to scaring movie audiences with projects like Don't Be Afraid of the Dark and Pacific Rim? I think that more than anything with Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is to create a setting that allows them to identify with a group of actors that are likeable and relatable playing these characters. And then doing terrible things to those characters. [Laughs] Or promising to do terrible things to those characters.

How do you think playing horror video games has influenced you when working on horror films? Video games have always influenced me. The aesthetics of the games in terms of lighting and sound design, effectual design…have always been important to me. There are some game designs that have been as powerful and as detailed as any movie. Even back in the days of CD-ROM games, there were very, very good games in terms of look and set design like Bad Mojo that was very important for me in finding a palette of textures, colors, and stuff like that.